Tottenham Hotspur: Personalising the Fan Experience

With data playing an increasingly critical role in driving decisions on the pitch, Premiership clubs are looking to get more value from their data in all areas of their strategy. Tottenham Hotspur Football Club got in touch with Clekt when they wanted to harness their supporter engagement across multiple channels. By capturing this loyalty and passion on one platform to create a single supporter view, they have laid the foundation for the club’s data-driven relationship with their fans.

A football fan and their chosen club have to be the ultimate customer relationship. Every single day, the average fan interacts with their club. They might be consulting the club news, reading the gossip, chatting with their WhatsApp football group, buying kits for the kids, or reliving YouTube goals. And looking beyond the beginning to 2021, hopefully soon fans will be returning to the stadium for live matches.

Long before Covid, this Premiership club was in the process of formulating a plan for a smarter, digitally driven fan experience, offering more to their supporters in the value chain. With fewer live events in 2020-21, this pressure to find alternative ways of keeping supporters engaged increased, and with it, the need for data-driven solutions for the next generation of smarter audience engagement.

Their challenge, however, began with harnessing the value in their data.

Being data-driven means having access to up to date, real-time data, and this was where this club had a problem: like many organisations, they were recording their supporter touchpoints in many separate legacy platforms, installed over time by different teams. The same fan had multiple records, siloed in other databases, with no single overview. Their systems were secure, robust and delivering great service to the club and their supporters, but the complexity of these separate systems was such that point-to-point integration was out of the question.

In short, their data was not joined up and as a result, there was no way to deliver a meaningful and genuinely personalised fan experience.

The Solution

Historically, all fan interactions were captured in separate, well-established operational systems. In order to form the complete 360 view of their fans, we worked with the club to begin the process of bringing all of this data together into one format, on one platform.

Rather than attempting point to point integration between these different databases, Clekt brought all of the club’s data sources onto one platform. Using techniques to rationalise the format of the data, Clekt has created one real-time, accurate single view of every fan.

The club are now in a position to harness the huge benefits presented by this single customer view.

The Results

• Personalised content using sophisticated AI to ensure that the right offers go to the right people at precisely the right time. The same applies to all channels – in App notification, email, messenger, social content, etc.
• The club will also make use of location and real-time data to truly amplify a matchday experience.
• Fans will be in the position of purchasing from the club in the format that suits them via an omnichannel retail approach.
• Beyond lockdown, this single customer view will also serve to get customers back into the stadium safely. With sophisticated crowd modelling and geolocation techniques to check in to the stadium and maintain correct crowd distancing measures, the club can make sure they are ready to comply with regulations and bring their fans back to cheer on their team.
• Complete digital transformation is the goal for this forward looking Premiership club. With Clekt’s consolidation of their data into one platform, they are now set to analyse and subsequently operationalise their data, with a real understanding of how supporters interact now and want to interact in the future.